Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975)

This rad and retro little number comes from the funky annals of mid-'70s made-for-TV movies, and is one of several in a string of similar productions in the post-Exorcist career of the fabulous Linda Blair. Having been monitoring the situation since 2005 when I discovered Linda, I have seen Sarah T. be drip-fed to the internet very slowly over the course of a decade. My first glimpse was of a cute scene which occurs some 25 minutes in, in which Sarah (Linda Blair) sings Carole King's It's Too Late at a party as a very youthful Mark Hamill looks on endearingly. Only recently did the whole movie become available to watch, so I was very excited to finally view it in its full form.

Sarah Travis is a slightly shy and reserved fifteen-year-old who is pissed about her parents' divorce and her mother's courting of another gent, and the necessity of her starting at a new school. Things don't go too well, and nerves get the better of her during her audition for the Glee Club. Meanwhile, her father (J.R. himself, Larry Hagman) dips in and out of her life, blowing money he doesn't have on presents for her and then disappearing again. Sarah's mother's pride is hurt to see her daughter struggling to get along in society, so she is pleased when chipper young local kid Ken Newkirk (Mark Hamill) calls by and invites Sarah to a party. She is reluctant at first, but the kids there are quite receptive of her, and after a couple of stiff ones (drinks, that is) she feels groovy and ready to sing, clad in the amazing denim two-piece with matching Casey Jones hat that Daddy bought her.

One of the girls from school who's at the party was present at Sarah's ill-fated Glee Club audition, and so requests her song for her from the resident guy-with-guitar. Dear Lord, we give you thanks and praise for the shaggy-haired guitar guy in every '70s movie ever, Amen. She gives a really cute little performance with her newfound Dutch courage, and comes to the quick realization that booze is the answer to all of life's problems! Ken soon discovers her in a sloppy state and drags her home, apologizing profusely to her outraged mother, whose primary concern is what the neighbours will say.

Ken and Sarah grow close and between the not-so-subtle flask and cup in her locker and her popular boyfriend, things start to get better for Sarah. But as an AA counsellor later warns, booze starts out by giving, and then ends up taking. She gets ridiculously large booze orders delivered to the house, running the shower and pretending her mother is home to convince the guy to let her accept them. And when Mom finally notices watered-down Scotch, she jumps straight to blaming and firing the housemaid. Sarah witnesses the whole thing, and being the ultimately decent kid that she is, she feels ashamed and does try to argue her mother's decision, but to little avail. Home is getting crazier. Sarah fights with her mother, with one culminating in the classic outburst, "He's not my father, he's just somebody you sleep with!"

School is getting similarly tumultuous, with Sarah finally getting caught for cutting classes and forging notes. Her mother is called to the school about it, and poor Sarah pitifully tries to hint her mum into cutting her some slack ("Oh, that was that day, Mom, remember?") and the school counsellor tells Mother Travis in no uncertain terms that something dodgy must be going on at home to be causing this. Of course, Sarah's socially-conscious mother is utterly outraged by such an implication, and furiously reminds the counsellor that she has successfully raised an elder daughter who turned out with no problems.

Things get even worse. Sarah and Ken finally make love, but the very next day he is edgy and cold, and soon informs Sarah that he has to focus on his schoolwork, and can't afford to be distracted by a troubled, needy girlfriend. She is, naturally, heartbroken, having decided just a couple of days before that Ken was the guy she would lose her virginity to. Although Ken seems like a good kid, and a pretty sensible one too, it also appears that he's a sporter of the Schoolboy Insensitivity badge. He doesn't recognise the stupidity and downright assholishness of dumping a fifteen-year-old girl the day after taking her virginity. This situation would have explosive consequences in any case, but with Booze's recurring guest-star spot in Sarah's everyday life, things go from bad to worse. Whilst babysitting her young niece, she sorrowfully hits the bottle and blacks out on the couch. Her parents end up breaking into the house in panic, to find her in a very conspicuous state.

Sarah is a pitiful character throughout. It is good to see an ultimately preachy movie be made through the eyes of the people it's trying to preach to, and therefore decipherable to the loony horny teenagers out there. It's true that teenagers don't like to listen to anybody. I remember being the same. Feeling the ridiculousness of a schoolmarmish grey-haired nurse telling us about sex. The ridiculousness of her warning us to use condoms when performing oral sex, and then the humiliation of people's reactions to the suggestion in real life. Fact was, they were outdated and didn't seem to have a clue. And when adults make made-for-TV movies about drugs or booze or underage sex, they seem to have a difficult time of it. I imagine pained cries from the offices of NBC..."How do I reeeach these keeeeeds?!" Writers Richard and Esther Shapiro really tune in to the teen wave, and bring the material down to the audience's level, where we can feel sorry for Sarah as she takes one saddening blow after another, rather than look down on her for her methods of coping. So the kids can understand how people like them can succumb to terrible ways so easily, and how shitty it feels when they do, but how readily they could seek help. It is a story of warning, but also of redemption, which really seems like the right way to do it. If we're being presented with a problem, it's nice to be simultaneously dealt a solution.

Sarah attends an AA meeting, resentment brimming in her eyes, where she hears a 10-year-old kid talk. He's been an alcoholic since the age of 3, because his old man (one of those black-and-white Brando-as-Kowalski types by the sounds of it) would get him drunk and laugh his head off about it with his buddies. This made me double-take. Teenage alcoholics is one thing, but a fucking three-year-old?! It really got me thinking. Abuse in this world knows no limit, so what is so unbelievable about there being some degenerate asshole, who fathered an unwanted kid, spends his every unemployed day drinking and slobbing, and gets a real kick out of sousing the toddler and seeing his drunken, diaper-covered ass hit the deck? Although my mind had never before conceived such a wretched thought, and it hit me hard upon presentation, it's really no surprise at all. And that's a sad thought.

Sarah leaves the meeting, seemingly unaffected, and deliberately so. She just doesn't seem convinced, doesn't seem ready to quit. So you know what that means...a highly traumatic incident, as a result of her drinking, to shock her into quitting. And surprisingly, this doesn't seem to be the time that she approaches a bunch of young guys to buy her booze, and ends up sucking them all off for the privilege, only for them to drink it to themselves and beat her up. How low can things possibly get for this poor little creature? Well, now visibly on the brink, she wanders around one night and decides to take Ken's pet horse for a ride. Don't drink and ride, kids. In a very well-shot sequence, she rides the horse out to the freeway and causes a pile-up. Linda Blair is (or was as a young woman) a very accomplished equestrian, and it is my suspicion that her skills in this field helps them to pull off such an effective shot.

Comes the monumental trauma, when the very real aftermath of her drunken actions take place. Still on the freeway, blue and red lights flashing everywhere, surrounded by cops, Sarah watches, devastated, as the agonized horse is put down by a vet, and Ken is sobbing his heart out on the roadside. Now, given the former scene I just described, and the personal degradation and trauma that Sarah endured, it speaks volumes about her character that this horse incident would be the turning point for her. Causing harm to herself was of no concern to her, but as soon as she realized she had really harmed others, it was finally too much to bear. Sarah Travis is a good kid, and one we can relate to. It's easy to forget how quickly things can spin out until we're in the spiral. That night, Sarah could have stayed sat out in the dark, drinking by herself, and then eventually gone home and passed out. But she made one unwise decision after another, and within a matter of minutes, her very quiet evening had gone to full-blown legal issue with life lost and relationships irretrievably destroyed.

Sarah's problem now formally comes to everyone's attention, and she is checked into a hospital, where she has to finally come to terms with herself and accept the help that everyone is offering her. Her parents have to endure each other to discuss their daughter's issues, and after a bunch of screaming, they both seem to see their own faults as parents, with Mother Travis guiltily putting down a glass of scotch clutched in her hand. Sarah comes to her parents, looks them straight in the eyes, and tells them, "I'm an alcoholic." Her mother still seems unbelieving of the idea. She almost laughs at the unreality of it all. But if ever, she should be proud of her daughter now, for expressing remorse for her errors, and strength of belief in herself to correct them.

Sarah T. is a really good movie for its kind. Thoughtfully written, filmed with care, and well acted. Linda Blair is a good actress, whose career took an incredibly unfortunate downturn in the late seventies. In a documentary, I heard her detail how she got caught up in a drug charge, when a friend repeatedly phoned her to ask if she knew any potential clients. Eventually she said, "OK, I might know someone," and with that recorded sentence, the police had a conviction for their commission cheque. And as is not unbelievable in the slightest, Linda's lawyer advised that her best option was a no contest, as the cops would ensure that any trial would ruin her financially, and still convict her in the end anyhow. ACAB, eh? It is particularly unfortunate that she didn't manage any big comeback like Downey Jr. or Gibson, especially as, by all accounts, she wasn't even a user to begin with. But then, she was a young hot star in late '70s Hollywood, so I dunno. Perhaps her crippling typecasting was just too big an obstacle.

Her later-young career involved a very sexy direction, both, I imagine, by choice and as a last resort. Linda did some gorgeous glamour and nude shoots for various magazines, and my God, are they a sight for sore eyes! As her teenage movies constantly teased, she indeed had an incredible, voluptuous figure, and the most beautiful face, which radiated both youth and attitude. Then her only movie credits were regular low budget exploitation flicks, in which she often got naked. Yeah, it wasn't ideal a mere decade after she was an Oscar nominee on the cover of every entertainment magazine -- she had become a B-movie queen that we loved to see naked. But she really owned it, and didn't decide years later to spin it as a story of woe and detailing how she was used and abused. She stood by her decisions. Linda Blair is one cool chick.


....Right?!